Tested and working in Scribus 1.3.9 running in Windows XP, Wine and Ubuntu 10.10.

Caveats

The script will clear any character formating in selected paragraphs (fonts, bold, superscripts etc), as scribus.getText() Python function get just plain text, not formating.

Some fonts can have different encodings depending operational system. Bullets glyphs can't appear if a publication made in Linux is opened in Windows, and vice-versa. This is true for "Dingbats" font from URW foundry.